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Thursday, August 25, 2011

Last Christmas I posted this super easy recipe for Christmas morning deliciousness. Like... just the recipe. But now I've actually made it! And even though it's only August, this needs to be a part of your life.

I made these sugary biscuits for dinner last Saturday night. That's real life... and that's why the photos are kind of washed out and dungeon-y, because in between shoving piping hot sugar doughnuts in my face, I was running around trying to figure out where all the sunlight is after 7 PM.

The other side of the world, that's where.

But it's okay. Bisquick. Cinnamon. Nutmeg. We're doing this.

Buttons and bows is fancy-talk for soft, baked cinnamon spice doughnuts, twisted into classy-looking figure-eights, baked until golden brown, then immediately rolled in melted butter and sugar and served warm.

They're soft, cakey, melt-in-your-mouth, and dangerouslyaddictive. Like... I would choose one of these over a doughnut shop doughnut anyday addictive. No questions. Even over buttermilk bars and apple fritters and fat cake doughtnuts with pink frosting and sprinkles.

Christmas mornings, birthday mornings, eighth-grade sleepovers, graduations... these sugar doughnuts have always been my family's go-to recipe for awesome and have done their part in making these mornings just a little bit more special for us. They're simple to make (who doesn't have Bisquick and cinnamon always lying around, waiting to be made delicious?), look super fancy, and come together in about ten minutes. Mix, roll, cut, bake, roll in sugar, DEVOUR, repeat.

Monday, August 22, 2011

The most important thing you should know about chocolate chip espresso bars is that they make your entire world smell like you're baking a small Starbucks coffee shop in your oven. We're talking cinnamon, sugar, butter, coffee, chocolate... all of my favorite words.

Sidenote: They're also dangerously addictive. For the same reasons.

... and for the crackly cinnamon-sugar glaze.

They have a super soft, super rich, brown sugar cookie bar base. Swoon. And look at those flecks of cinnamon and coffee! They really make the chocolate flavor pop.

And if I hadn't made these, I might be a little closer to that myself. But let me tell you... these bars are so rich and so sugary, that it's almost like eating some kind of chocolate chip cookie dough frappuccino fudge sheet cake, if there were such a thing.

And there totally should be.

P.S. I really want to make these with half semisweet and half white chocolate chunks. I'm kind of in love with that combination since these cookies.

Preheat oven to 375°F, with the rack at middle level. Line a 10x15-inch jelly roll pan with parchment paper or grease lightly.

In a large bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream together the butter, brown sugar, espresso powder, and vanilla. Slowly add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mix until just blended. Stir in the chocolate chips. The dough will be very crumbly, with just barely enough dough to hold together the chocolate chips.

Press dough evenly into the jelly roll pan with your hands.

Bake for 5 minutes, rotate the pan, and bake for 5-10 minutes more or until the edges are just starting to brown (watch carefully... I baked mine for a total of 18 minutes). Cool in the pan 5 minutes before spreading with the glaze.

To make the glaze, place milk, butter, sugar, and cinnamon in a small saucepan over medium heat. Whisk until smooth and barely bubbly. Drizzle the glaze evenly over the bars and smooth out to the edges and corners with a rubber spatula. Cool until the pan is just warm to the touch, then cut into bars and serve.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Sometimes I try to get creative. Sometimes I just throw the cookies on a plate and scatter some flour and chocolate chips and things in the background like some kind of artistic baking explosion just naturally happened in my kitchen... but I'm too type A for that. When I get behind the camera, the next thing I know my hand's sneaking into the frame, organizing everything into pretty little piles.

I can't help it. It's who I am.

I also giggle a lot when I'm making miniature things. Miniature cookies. Miniature muffins. Miniature recipes for making two vanilla cupcakes. There's just something exciting about scaling everything down.

... maybe because you know you're about to eat twice as many chocolate chip pancakes and feel half as guilty about it.

Sidenote: I also giggle when my dad makes beer-can chicken. That's happening right now. I can't even go into the kitchen. It's... yeah. I don't even want to talk about it.

But I was in there earlier though! For ten minutes. Making chocolate chip cookies.

Four of them. These four. Like... seriously. This is the entire batch.

Because like the vanilla cupcakes for two, sometimes you just want a warm, chewy, freshly-baked, crispy chocolate chip cookie to share with someone without having to worry about the other twenty or so cookies, that you say you'll give away to family and friends, or freeze and eat reasonably over the next couple of weeks... but we all know will just wind up getting eaten over the open freezer sometime between 3 and 4 AM within three days of baking them.

Not that this ever happens.

You know. Just every time I bake cookies. Whatever.

The best thing about this recipe though, minus the reduced guilt and the fact that they're amazing delicious cookies, is the creativity. You can do anything with them. It's like life! Throw in peanut butter chips. Pretzels. Crushed Oreos. Twix. All the above! Invent your very own cookie.

Tell me this makes someone else giggle. I can't take myself seriously when I'm only baking four cookies. It's like Easy-Bake Oven for grown-ups, you know? Because of the real oven and all.

P.S. The full recipe for these can be found here, in case you want more than four cookies sometimes... like twenty-four. A whole two dozen. I fully support that.

Mix together the shortening, brown sugar, and granulated sugar. Add the tablespoon of beaten egg and vanilla and mix until combined. Add the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon and mix until just combined. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Roll dough into four cookie balls and place them on a lightly greased cookie sheet (you can also bake them in two lightly greased tart pans, a muffin top pan, cupcake pan, whatever you desire). Flatten them slightly with your hand.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Let's talk about love. Long-distance love. And boys. And cookies. And boxes.

I've been dating my boyfriend for three years, three months, and fifteen days. What? Crazy. We met in college... back when I didn't bake and had super-short red hair and dreamed of being the next Veronica Mars.

We've been long-distance for... oh geez, I hate math. Three years, three months, and twenty-two days minus my last two semesters. So... about 2 years and three-four months... minus trips home and holidays. This just got confusing.

It's not always easy. Long-distance means cramming a month of love and dates and arguments and face-to-face conversations into a 48-hour weekend. It means staying up until you're bleary-eyed at 2 AM & playing Battleship on the phone (and winning). It means spending New Year's, birthdays, and anniverseries alone when work or life gets complicated... or having to text "Merry Christmas!" instead of rolling over in bed and saying it yourself.

Have you ever shipped cookies to anyone? It's no easy thing. My parents sent me a box of home-baked Christmas cookies when I was away at college... UPS delivered a box of crumbled cookie crumbs. It was delicious, but I had no idea what I was eating.

Let's do this.

First things first: bake some cookies! Obviously. Brownies work too, if you're into that sort of thing. Something classic and comforting and chocolatey... but nothing too fragile, soft, or crumbly.

And be sure to eat one warm from the oven, purely for research purposes. It's important.

While you eat them they're cooling: since you're already baking cookies for a boy, don't stop there. Go all out, like it's high school. Pretend it's 2001 and you're still passing notes between classes and wearing butterfly clips in your hair. Burn that man a CD.

Because really. Who hates music? Exactly.

Drop some love in that box. Write a note! Handwrite it. No, really. It's fun. It's like Dear John, but with a way better ending. Seriously.

Okay. Now the fun/crazy part. How to ship these across the state/country/world without them breaking. There's probably a hundred different ways to do it, but here's how I do it:

Stack the cookies in groups of three or four and wrap them as tight as you can with cling wrap. This keeps them from smacking against each other in the box and getting all crumbly. They'll stay fresh longer too!

Put them all in a big Ziplock bag and zip that thing up.

Wrap the bag with a couple of layers of paper towels. Put that bag in a box and surround it with crumpled newspapers. (Or take it to UPS and have them surround the bag with packing peanuts... that's what I did since I didn't have any boxes.)

Shake the box like a crazy person. Throw it across the room. Pretend you're a FedEx truck. The cookies should be safe and secure and definitely not moving.

Mail it!

I shipped these across the state Friday morning & they arrived Tuesday afternoon, fresh, intact, and delicious. Four and a half days in a box and still in perfect uncrumbled condition, without dropping $75 (seriously. $75. What? Crazy.) for next-day shipping? Victory.

Monday, August 8, 2011

I know, where's the chocolate? Do you dip them in cheesecake? Is there secretly a s'more baked inside?

Yes.

... no! Did you really think I'd do that? Goodness.

So... yeah. These are just biscuits. Nothing to see here. Just plain, boring, fat, flaky, melt-in-your-mouth, super fluffy buttermilk biscuits.

You know... the kind of biscuits that you can peel apart layer by soft, thin, buttery layer.

The kind of biscuits worth sneaking out of bed at 2 AM for.

Which I did not do/I totally did this.

We're talking the kind of biscuits that don't even need a pat of melted butter, a drizzle of honey, or a heaping spoonful of raspberry jam.

But obviously... do this.

Unless you're slicing them in half and piling them up with scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, and melted cheddar cheese. Or rolling them in cinnamon and sugar and baking them on top of a delicious fruit cobbler. All of these are ideas that I can get behind.

Whatever you do with them... make them happen. And they're super easy to throw together... which, you know, will give you plenty of time to throw flour all over the place and make words and doodly hearts in it. Because that's totally what adults do.

Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Scatter the cubes of cold butter over the top of the flour mixture; cut in and mix using a pastry cutter or fork until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

Add the buttermilk and continue to mix using fork or pastry cutter until mixture just begins to come together.

Scrape the dough onto a lightly floured counter and pat the dough into a 10 by 12-inch rectangle about 3/4-inch thick. Use a 3-inch round biscuit cutter to cut out biscuits and place them on a lightly greased baking sheet about 2 inches apart.

Brush the tops of the biscuits with heavy cream.

Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until lightly golden brown. Remove from the oven and brush tops with melted butter. Serve warm and enjoy!

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Well... my blog's birthday, my one year blogiversary. What! Crazy. An entire year of blogging? I think we should celebrate. With cake. This cake, a simple, but beautiful, two-layered chocolate cake with pink vanilla buttercream.

... yeah. I know. I made it just for you.

Somehow I stumbled across the Pioneer Woman's website in college and fell absolutely in love with the idea of writing a blog and learning how to bake something. Every so often, if I had a law paper to procrastinate or school was getting stressful and I was missing home, I'd check out her blog and stare at some photos of Bassett Hounds and cinnamon rolls and melting butter and feel instantly less stressed. And happier. With this compulsive urge to go bake something with flour and sugar and sprinkles.

Which turned into this compulsion to bake, take photos of everything important/not important at all, and plaster it all over the Internet.

And I've loved every single moment of it. Writing about it, creating new recipes, making mistakes, learning new things, and sharing it all with you. Honestly, you're all amazing. I never thought anyone besides my best friend would read this so I'm incredibly thankful to every one of you who finds my little piece of the Internet worth reading.